Nightmares of Meloen faction

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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

Velensk wrote:For the first one against the drakes. Nightmares have a seriouse problem against drakes. They have all of three units that are effective against the drakes themselves. Creepers, Darkness, and Spectre.

Darkness and Spectre are quite effective at hurting drakes, however they are both very expensive, and both die very easy to either firebreath or drake melee power (or both incombination.

Creepers die very easy to drakes too, but they are very cheap and at night do major damage. However they are also slow, which means that drakes can easily outmonuver them and smash them at day when they do 4 damage per strike (when they arn't being killed by burner flames)

Proposal: Make spectre of death a little cheaper (18), and decrease it's melee power slightly. Possibly make another unit capable of killing/hurting woses.
I think you under-estimated the use of the dark egg in this match the same way we tend to do with grunts against drakes in the 1st match. If you retry this match, I'd suggest to have dark egg as the bulk of your forces, 1 eye if you see several saurians, and 1 spectre if you see gliders, augurs and clashers. The darkness is here as a support and in no way can tank vs drakes, have it backline and more than one sounds irreasonnably expensive. Nice use of the creepers by the way for this match, I was eager to see how it fared (only tried this against cpu :annoyed: ), and this looked rather ok to me for some defense.

Velensk wrote:The second one is him testing all creepers vs orcs. The orcs got buckets of luck, but I don't think that it would have been a problem even without extreme luck. However I think that in combination with other units, and on a diffrent map, the creeper swarm may be a problem. I would sugest as a measure to help avoid that giving creepers a -30% resistance to fire/cold. This way archer arrows kill them in one hit at night, and the other factions (minus knalgans and possibly rebles/loyalists) will have some serious counter unit(s). Mages seem just a bit to expensive/fragile to counter creepers.

Woses will work for the rebels, I imagine that humans can out monuver creepers and attack them at day, when it isn't a huge issue. I think that dwarven fighters on hills ought to be tough enough to beat off the creeper attacks, 5-5 chaotic is about 10 damage at night to a dwarf on a hill if the creeper survives the dwarf attack. The dwarf will kill roughly half the creepers that attack him. In the end the figher would probably die do the shear numbers, but he'd do enough damage that the rest of hte knalgan forces should have no trouble mopping up.
Hey, that's good you tried this ! Well, to be honest I agree with you on the underlined part. And against any other faction I see reasons why an early creeper spam has a good chance to fail. Elves and dwarves you told it, undeads will just need skels, and an adept has a 1shot kill on them at night, for humans spearmen just crush them most of the time (or at least 3 of them before dying by sheer number, which is fair eco-wise), drakes will easily outmanoeuver, and a strong grunt has such efficiency against creepers at night that a single one is a real pain to a creeper based strategy. I'm not sure giving a one-shot kill to the orc archers is really needed : 5g is cheap but that's more than 0 nevertheless, plus some small upkeep, plus logistics slowness and the fact they take a lot of slots to be efficient thus restraining your other units moves, I think you pay a lot of indirect price for their efficiency. Nice test anyway, I encourage governor to prove me wrong with a game showing an efficient creeper early abuse.

PS : I saw you had a few problems with the recruiting list and an OOS at the end, that's being a true issue, urgent to fix but I have no idea how to :? .
PS Edit : the recruiting list seems to be a 1.5 problem, since it happens also on default era, and I couldn't reproduce the OOSes.
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rooster6050
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by rooster6050 »

ooh can i help test it? i like the idea of the creepers and unstable elemntal
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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

No need to ask, the faction is downloadable for a reason : to be played, whether you want to give feedback or not, although I prefer, as a maintainer, that you do the former.
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Skizzaltix
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Skizzaltix »

Interesting faction! Though, it's certainly one that takes a little getting used to--I just thrashed myself as the Drakes.
Anyway, I didn't save the replay (The loss was mostly due to my own tactical errors as the Nightmares), but I have a few comments on attack names...
I think you could change "blunt charge" to "ram". They're synonymous, and the shorter the attack name, the better, right? ;)
Also, "sidelong look"? It certainly fits the "eye of disdain", and it's rather amusing, but are you trying to be amusing here?
"crunch" should probably be "crush"--To me, at least, "crunch" means crushing the target in between two things (Like jaws), rather than whacking them... Up to you, though.
And then, how about switching "water blast" and "billow"? To me, at least, "billow" means a wave--Not the most effective ranged attack ;)
Anyway, nice job! Hope to see more out of this faction :)
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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

I'll be away for 1 week and half, don't worry if I don't answer.

@Skizzaltix : there are some idiomatics I really have trouble to translate so hey, your input is welcome, I'm changing these names for next edition. About the sidelong look, the attack is supposed to be a mental trick to put the victim ill at ease, and turn this embarassment into suffer. I thought the name was ok. Gaze would be a bit more creepy but a bit vague as well, but I would replace sidelong look if it really sounds funny in english.
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Skizzaltix
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Skizzaltix »

In English, "sidelong look" implies suspicion and/or disdain--I think "stare" would probably better :)
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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

Update bump.

I changed names according to Skizzaltix suggestions.

Also I decreased by 1 the eye ranged attack, I was fearing that it would overpower the unit against loyalists and knalgan and Velensk confirmed that thought after a brief talk.

On the other hand, I slightly modified the nightmare race to make it slightly less resilient against blade and pierce while significantly better against the other damage types, especially cold and impact. For cold I don't know, but I wanted the spectre to be more efficient against woses and trolls, as well as slightly more resilient to fire and do more damage against drake. Thus, I also boosted its cold drain attack. Note that the increase in health makes the drain slightly less efficient, so the increase in drain damage looks as fair as before resilience wise, it will just do more damages. I also decreased the darkness ranged retaliation to make up for the fact it is slightly more resistant against the ones supposed to tear it appart : fire and arcane rangers.

Edit : version updated.
After some talk and gaming with ping and Maboul, I slightly followed their suggestion and decreased the ability for dark eggs to hold villages. They are still ok at doing it, though. I also decreased the spectre and darkness standard resist, which were making them too much of a problem against loyalists along with the pierce resist egg, not sure about the effect on other match-ups though.
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Temuchin Khan
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Temuchin Khan »

JW wrote:
krotop wrote:I quickly read the thread you bumped, a lot of ideas are divergent from the Nightmares of Meloen, but some are indeed surprisingly close. I know, now, what were some of the filler arts I picked coming from. I need to put Eternal in the credits, that unknown : Child of Rage line was annoying. Would you mind if I borrow it as filler until the Aberration faction is playable, or maybe I should pm Eternal about that ? Talking about aberration, it's the name of one of the races, along with nightmares and insects, that I created for the faction. It's a bit of a & d Cuyo Quiz proposed in his 1st post in that thread.
Oh hey, I was just having a memory. I wasn't trying to claim ownership of the idea in this thread or make a claim about any art, or anything in that vein of thought. I'm sorry for having to clear that up.

Also, all art here is GPLed, but if you want to talk to Eternal I'm sure he'd be cool with that too.
Couldn't these guys replace and/or be combined with the Aberrations? Then EOM would be complete....
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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

We've never discussed about this with Velensk. As far as I see it, Velensk put a lot of time in trying to solve this n-puzzle, taking a lot of time to polishing the balance and place the last numbers. I'm not sure he would be up for suddenly adding a column and row right when he's reaching his goal. Moreover, I can admit the graphic concepts and sprite arts aren't polished enough to suit for a polished faction. And I don't see it progress enough in the next months.

As for me, I completly oriented the balance toward default so it would require a lot of things to tweak, eventually units to plainly remove and replace by other concepts. But I'm ok for doing it since I don't have an era ready for the faction, if all I just said before hasn't disgusted all persons concerned by EoM, and principally its maintainer, to do it.
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Velensk
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Velensk »

I wish I had the time to do as you described, but that is what I had been working towards. However JW descirbed something that I could do that might let me include your faction. If I broke it up into two eras, EoM complete, and EoM balanced, then I could focus on balancing the one, but include all the other fitting factions in the other.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
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krotop
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by krotop »

Right, you were talking about that some months ago if I recall correctly. I'm glad you finally decided to sacrifice some of your factions temporarily to make the balance easier, I believe it is the proper way to work and it should probably have been done that way since the beginning. The EoM is appealing for casual gaming and AI fighting, but it won't be appealing for more serious MP fights as long as you don't have a set of factions reliably balanced against each other. If I have to add the faction to EoM, I'd much prefer to work the balance around a few factions I can rely on than a lot whose balance is subject to modifications.

But there is no 1.5 version for EoM yet, so until then I'm continuing to work around default. And talking about it :
Update, I messed up with files and uploaded an anterior version, without the modifications anounced in the original post's update diary. Also, FreeAsABeer coded a nice feature that allows people to get a random faction excluding Nightmares of Meloen, so that playtesting is easier. Thank you FAAB, added.
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by AI »

It wouldn't be much effort to create a 1.5 port on the umc svn. You could then use that for balancing.
Velensk
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Velensk »

I'm going to ask this because I've looked all over that site and I couldn't find it. Where do you download a sf cliet?
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by AI »

Assuming you're on windows, you get Tortoise SVN, then check out the Era of Myths: https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge ... a_of_Myths
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Re: Nightmares of Meloen faction

Post by Velensk »

Actualy I use a mac.
"There are two kinds of old men in the world. The kind who didn't go to war and who say that they should have lived fast died young and left a handsome corpse and the old men who did go to war and who say that there is no such thing as a handsome corpse."
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